Following a national backlash from white supremacists to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws of the 1960s and 70s, white fundamentalists finally began to organize. They left the Democratic party throughout the Southern and Middle states and joined with the Republican party to eradicate the feminist-liberal-Black-atheist-Democratic-nonconformist-communist-Nothern elitist-hippie Californian-Hollywood-nontraditionalist threats to the American way of life. Americans bought into it. The enemy was no longer simply a communist sympathizer. The enemy was someone you already disliked and distrusted.